


Cost of Living

by potofsoup



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-15
Updated: 2014-08-15
Packaged: 2018-02-13 05:58:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2139648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potofsoup/pseuds/potofsoup
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve really wishes Bucky was there in the 21st century to help him deal with the money stuff.  Set just after Steve's thawing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cost of Living

"So, um, Captain, what's been the hardest to adjust to in the 21st century?" asked the young SHIELD receptionist from behind the desk. Steve wasn't quite sure what made her seem young. Was it that she looked about 20, in her first job out of school, and was desperately trying to make small talk with Captain America? But Steve was only 25 himself. Maybe between the Depression and the War, he was the one who's older than his age. Steve briefly wondered if he should start thinking of himself as 95, but it didn't feel right.

"Care to guess, Miss?" He put on his best, most reassuring Captain America smile. The muscles felt stiff and foreign, but then again he'd only been thawed for two days. The receptionist returned the smile and relaxed. "I'm Haley." Steve marveled at the way her smile reached her eyes so easily, over so small a thing. Her inexperience with death, Steve decided, was what made her seem young. It was refreshing to wake up in a time when so few were touched by war.

"Hmm... I'd guess the technology." She gestured at a small rectangular screen on her desk. "This is a smart phone, and these days, you can do *everything* on it.... Take notes, look up driving directions, take pictures, listen to music, play games..."

Steve pulled out his pocket notebook and said with a serious face. "Well *this*, Miss Haley, is a paper notebook. I use it to take notes, draw pictures, and write down transit directions." He held it up to his ear. "Can't hear any music coming out of it, though." She laughed, all nervousness gone. "Here, Captain," she shoved an earpiece toward him while simultaneously fiddling on her smart phone. "Put this in your ear. You've *gotta* listen to this."

As a song about being true to yourself entered his ears, Steve mused that technology was never that hard to grasp. After all, they're just tools that were designed by humans for humans. It's like picking up a HYDRA gun -- once you know it's a gun built for humans, it's mostly a matter of making sure you're pointing it in the right direction and finding the triggering mechanism. Looking at the phone in her hands, it seemed to be a condensed version of the field radios that Morita used to carry: wireless, with its own portable power supply, designed for portable communication. He was about to ask about the modern version of the hand crank, when someone coughed gently behind him and Haley yanked out the ear piece in a panic and hid her phone. "Sir! I'm so sorry!"

Steve turned to find a prim man in a neat gray suit. He looked a bit older than Steve, especially with the glasses, and there was a certain tightness about his eyes that made Steve feel defensive and closed-in. "Good morning, Captain Rogers. I'm Agent Sitwell. Welcome to the 21st century." Steve did not feel very welcomed. "I'm here to talk to you about money. If you would follow me to my office?" Steve swallowed. Now money. Money never made sense.

\------

One would think that growing up poor Steve would be good at managing money. But the problem with growing up poor was that he never had much money to manage. All the money his mother made went straight into rent and food and medicine. He never got any spending money -- he read Bucky's comic books, found paper and pencil scraps to draw on, and checked out books from the library. 

Being given money felt like such a boon that he almost accepted the 30 cents an hour wage for Western Union before Bucky stepped in and argued it up to 50 cents. He remembered Bucky crowing as they walked home that day, so pleased with himself, "And if you can work all your hours without getting sick, that'll be eighty dollars a month! For just sitting and connecting wires!"

\-------------

"Can you say that again?"

"Roughly eighteen thousand dollars a month." Sitwell looked up from page 46 of the packet in front of him. "That's factoring in living expenses for New York, of course. If you choose to move to the DC headquarters you'll only be drawing a monthly salary of seventeen thousand."

Sitwell took Steve's stunned silence to be dissatisfaction. "Of course, that's just the Army base rate for an officer of your standing. SHIELD is happy to add any additional benefits you find necessary." He pulled out another daunting packet full of charts and started leafing through it. 

Steve paled and quickly said, "No, it's great, eighteen thousand dollars sounds fine." He silently congratulated himself for managing to say the whole sentence without stumbling over the word "thousand". 

"Great, we are agreed. Now..." He next pulled out a series of colorful folders, each one emblazoned with a stylized logo and containing yet more packets and pamphlets. "I don't believe your old bank is still in operation, so you'll need to establish a new bank account. These are some of the more common options, though if you'd prefer a credit union, I can..." He pulled open a filing cabinet near his desk and started riffling through it. 

Steve quickly pointed to the one familiar name that jumped out from the packets. "I'll go with this one." JP Morgan Chase. He remembered his dad's buddies sitting around drunk and ranting about the federal reserve cartel, but now it seemed positively reassuring in this field of foreign bank names. "Ah, Chase. Good choice. We should get it set up right away, so that the Army can deposit your two million dollars of back pay."

Steve felt faint. He didn't remember much else of the meeting after that.

On the way out Steve asked Haley the receptionist whether she knew how much a dollar in 1940 is worth now. She brandished her smart phone with a smile and after poking at it for a bit, she announced, "Seventeen dollars and two cents." Steve thanked her and made a mental note to get his own phone and computer as soon as possible. Even if it meant he'd have to buy it. With his millions.

It didn't make sense, though -- even given that what Haley told him, he's still making the equivalent of a thousand dollars a month, a far cry from the eighty he made as a telegraph operator, or even the three hundred he was making as a Captain. Steve smiled grimly. He needed to make a budget. 

\------------------

It was two weeks after his mom passed and a week before Bucky moved in with Steve, that Bucky discovered that Steve was absolutely abysmal with money. Bucky had stopped by Steve's apartment after work, and found him rummaging through a pile of papers in the dark kitchen, looking frantically for the electricity bill and occasionally running to hold a piece of paper up to the gas stove to decipher its words. Bucky laughed so hard he fell on the floor and mussed up his pressed pants. "Holy hell, Steve, good thing I'm moving in with you."

The next day, he talked Steve through the making of a budget. "Remember to pay rent on the first day of the month, and also the utilities -- in a pinch you can make do without the electricity," he chuckled again, "but you *gotta* have water. And try not to burn the place down with your stove shenanigans. Now, your share of the rent's gonna be $30. You don't eat that much, so food's probably $20-$30, plus the utilities are $5, which leaves fifteen whole dollars for spending money." Steve nodded and pretended that all fifteen of those dollars was going to movies and comics and drawing supplies, knowing full well that it's going to the medicines that keep him alive, not to mention the pay he'll lose for the days he'll be too sick to work. Bucky was getting excited about the budgeting process, though, so he dutifully wrote down "$15 remainder" in his notebook next to the expenditures list and the pie chart.

\----------------

His first month in the 21st century was an eventful one, what with getting an apartment in Brooklyn and aliens attacking New York, but he still couldn't quite believe the numbers as he wrote down "$10,000 remainder" at the end of his budget list. The majority of his expenditures was actually the $5000 income tax, which reminded him of the arguments he had with Bucky about the Victory Tax ("The government needs money to operate, Buck." He'd argued. "Whether we agree with *how* it operates is a separate issue.") More unsettling was the fact that rent is now four times the cost of food, and the list of monthly utilities have grown immense -- internet, cable television, phone, transit card, gym membership, etc. What happened to the days when you could just get by with a few nickles and a library card? Despite all that, he *still* had ten thousand dollars remaining every month. Not to mention the $2 million back pay.

Steve sat back and eyed his sparsely furnished apartment. What should he do with such an astronomical figure? He felt as rich as John D Rockefeller, or Howard Stark. Maybe he should ask someone. Bucky's not around anymore, but he recently met some people, and one of them was Howard's son. 

He found Tony Stark atop the Stark Tower in his Iron Man suit, juggling a large "S". "Oh hey, Cap! How's it going? Mind giving me a hand with the other side of this S here? Yeah, I need that side to hook onto the wobbly thing there. Yeah, perfect." Steve helped him set the "S" in its place, idly wondering how Tony was planning to do it if he hadn't shown up. There's a certain nervous youthful energy to Tony that reminded him more of Haley the receptionist than the 40-year-old genius billionaire philanthropist that Tony claimed to be. But then again, around Tony Steve always felt 95. 

After they somehow pulled off the stunt with the "S" Tony invited him to his office. It was teeming with workers fixing the holes left by Hulk and Loki, but Tony simply ignored them, poured himself a drink and plunked down on a spare pile of plywood. "What's up, Capsicle? Heard you got an apartment. Need any furniture? Actually I'm making some bulk orders and I can send some over. What's your address? Wait, nevermind, I can just look that up." Tony stopped to turn his head and yell, "JARVIS!" 

"Actually, Stark, I'm fine." Steve took this opportunity to cut in, and couldn't help smiling. He remembered the trouble he had trying to talk Howard out of arming his shield with machine guns.

Tony peered at him over his drink. "So why are you here? Haven't heard from you since our Loki send-off party." Tony pouted extravagantly. "You know you could text some time. Actually I'm hurt you haven't texted. Thought we had..."

"You have a lot of money, right?"

Tony paused, mid-sentence, and raised an eyebrow. "Yes, sure. What, you need money? You'll have to talk to Pepper about the charities -- I think I'm on 10 different boards or something." Tony corrected himself, "Well, *she's* on 10 different boards, to be exact. Maybe 11, I think she was talking about something about Bangladesh and water last night ..."

"I already have money. I just don't know what to do with it." Steve paused. "What do you do? With your money."

Tony shrugged, bored. "Buy things -- gadgets, cars, planes. Pepper likes art. We fly to Paris on the weekends for dates. Build things like Stark Tower and my suits. Start business ventures. What, how much money are you talking about? 10 million? 20 million? I guess I could look up what's in your bank account, but ...." Tony stopped short at the look on Steve's face, "...I wouldn't. Because that's rude." He abruptly got up from the pile of plywood and went to pour himself another drink. "Look, Cap. I'm the worst guy to talk to about this. I've always had too much money." Tony took a long time pouring the drink. "I *think* normal people buy a house, save up for their kid's college, rack up credit card bills at Christmas, maybe buy season tickets to some ball game." He smiled wryly. "But then they pay for therapy because they don't feel happy, so don't know if that should be your game plan."

Steve looked at the Tony Stark standing before him. Now he looked 40, and older than Howard was when Steve last saw him. Older than Steve, too. "Thanks, Tony. This has been helpful." Steve clapped a hand on Tony's shoulder. "And I think you know more about money than you give yourself credit for. More than Howard, at least. And certainly more than me." Tony opened his mouth, and then closed it. Steve silently cursed himself for reminding Tony of his father. "Sorry." Steve muttered as he turned and made a beeline for the door. "I shouldn't have... I'll just go now." 

Steve was almost out the room when he heard Tony yell after him, "Hey Steve! Just remember, you're Captain fuckin' America. I'm just a billionaire playboy who likes blowing stuff up, but whatever YOU do, people are gonna look at it like it MEANS something."  
Steve turned and smiled. "Thanks, Tony." He waved his phone. "Text me next time you're in Brooklyn. JARVIS can probably find my number." Steve decided that Tony Stark was a good man, and definitely not Howard.

\--------------------

Howard Stark never understood what it meant to have a finite amount of money, and that had always irked Bucky.

"It's like he just has this magical ability to wave his hands and *make* things, without thinking about how much it all fuckin' costs." They were sitting at the pub and Bucky was drinking too much. That afternoon Howard had just showed off the Captain America uniform that he'd pulled together in 3 days, and with the uniform done, the Commandos were all set to go. "Three fucking days. Can you imagine, Steve? Probably doesn't even know how to budget." Bucky laughed into his drink. "Just like you, Steve. No wonder you two get along."

"Well, what would *you* do if you had infinite money?" Steve shot back. It's true, though. When he's with Howard, everything just seemed possible. Steve didn't even think to ask how much his shield cost. He'd just picked it up and asked for it. Howard's wealth was a part of him, always present and dependable, and he could spend it without thought. It's like how Steve felt about his new body -- always giving him so much mental and physical energy that he could just call upon at will, sometimes he forgot the twenty-odd years he spent coughing, half-deaf and half-blind and fighting to walk straight. But then he'd catch Bucky giving him an odd look and he'd remember what it was like to have nothing but Bucky. 

"I think I'd just give it away." Bucky said next to him. When Steve wasn't paying attention Bucky had transitioned from being a very loud drunk to a very quiet drunk. "Sure, first I'd make sure my family's all set up, and save some to treat girls to nice dinners. And help you pay for art school." Bucky smiled at the thought of Steve going to art school. "But after that? Something to help other people have a chance." He shot Steve a look. "Not all punk kids get to have the super serum, y'know." Bucky's gaze slid past the bartender and into the distance. "And this war ... it does things to people...." Steve was still thinking about what Bucky meant, but Bucky shook himself out of his revelry, drained his glass in one gulp and smiled, loudly. "Or I'll just spend it all on beer. You're paying, right, Captain-makes-twice-what-i-do?"

It was only later that Steve realized Bucky didn't save any money for himself.

\--------------------

He wished Bucky was there with him in the 21st century. Bucky who understood money and Steve in a way that Steve didn't. Bucky who died fighting HYDRA last month and 70 years ago. Bucky who kept Steve honest and was always there to remind Steve that he wasn't just made of super serum. Thinking about Bucky made Steve feel 25 and 95 at the same time. What would Bucky say about Steve having 2 million dollars in his bank account? He'd probably laugh in disbelief and call him Howard. Then he'd help Steve spend it.

Steve pulled out his smart phone and dialed a number. "Hi Agent Sitwell. I'd like your help in setting up a James Buchanan Barnes Foundation."

**Author's Note:**

> Basically this is barely-disguised meta about Steve and money, inspired by [this post](http://potofsoup.tumblr.com/post/93430537777/rainnecassidy-melannen-rgfellows), although somehow it also turned into a thing about Tony and Bucky. This is my first time writing Tony, so apologies. (Dialogue is one of those things that I think is easier with comics.)
> 
> Income tax wasn't mandatory for non-government employees until WWII, when it was instituted as the Victory Tax, but it was then repealed in 1944, but the repeal process was so confusing that it actually persisted and became the income tax we have today. [Donald Duck teaches you how to file your income tax](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00u6qUelp6c)!
> 
> And here's a link about how [hand cranks](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_magneto) were used to generate the electricity needed to power the phone call in old phones -- imagine if you're mid-call when your cell phone battery dies, and you just ... shake it a bunch and keep talking.
> 
> And here's the link to the [17k vs. 18k thing](http://archiveofourown.org/comments/11266771) \-- based off of base wages if Steve got auto-promoted to Major General. And yes I did look up [the wages for Western Union Telegraph](http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112003454219;view=1up;seq=33). I got the rent information from this [Remember When](http://potofsoup.tumblr.com/post/94698672612/heres-some-sketchy-photos-of-pages-from-my) cardlet.
> 
> Find me on tumblr @[potofsoup](http://potofsoup.tumblr.com).


End file.
